Inventory Operations Manager

Job description

About Us Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is the intelligent platform for travel and spend management. Built to tackle the time-consuming, manual work that gets in the way of real work, our tools automate everything from travel bookings to expenses, invoice processing, and more. By eliminating this shadow work that wastes hours, erodes morale, and saps innovation, we're on a mission to power real work, with real impact. We're trusted by more than 12,000 companies worldwide, including On Running, Breitling, and Fabletics, and we're tackling the 7 hours of lost productivity per employee each week, a $1.7 trillion problem https://www.perk.com/shadow-work-report. Founded in 2015, Perk has grown into a global company of more than 1,800 people across 12 offices globally, with headquarters in London and Boston. We combine innovation, control, and simplicity to transform how businesses work and how people feel at work. At Perk, we're driven by our values, like being an owner, delivering a 7-star experience, and working as one team. We value curiosity, purpose, and mindset, not just knowledge, to unlock the power in your potential. Our talent team brings together leading minds from the travel, fintech, and SaaS industries, representing over 70 countries. If you're excited about having a real impact and shaping how millions of people experience work, we'd love you on the team. Visit www.perk.com http://www.perk.com to learn more. ABOUT THE ROLE At Perk, our Inventory Operations team ensures that the travel and spend content powering our platform is accurate, reliable, and high-quality. We're looking for a Manager, Inventory Operations to lead our growing team of 8 specialists spanning flights, ground transportation, and stays. This is a hybrid role: you'll manage and develop the team, while staying hands-on in the work yourself, diagnosing complex issues, setting technical standards, and modeling the bar you expect from others. You won't just manage output; you'll be a credible technical partner who can step into the detail when it matters, across all three verticals we support. You'll report to the Director of Operations and be accountable for how the team operates day to day, and for the quality and reliability of inventory content across flights, ground transportation, and stays. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Lead and Develop the Team: Manage, coach, and grow a team of 8 Inventory Ops specialists across flights, ground transportation, and stays. Set individual growth plans, run performance conversations, and build a team that operates with increasing autonomy. - Stay Hands-On: Dedicate meaningful time to IC-level work, diagnosing complex supplier, GDS, or content issues yourself, prototyping fixes, and setting the technical bar the team works to. You lead by doing, not just directing. - Optimise Across Verticals: Identify where operational support is inconsistent or underdeveloped across flights, ground transportation, and stays, and build the standards, tooling, and processes that bring all three to the same level of reliability. - Set the Standard: Define operational standards and governance frameworks that reduce BAU workload and increase reliability across teams and markets. Lead retrospectives and drive scalable process refinements. - Turn Data into Direction: Use data as a strategic asset to guide the team's priorities. Define success metrics for the team's work and translate insights into clear recommendations for senior stakeholders. - Represent the Team: Own the narrative for senior leadership, connecting the team's operational outcomes to business goals. Represent Inventory Operations in cross-functional forums with Product, Engineering, and supplier-facing teams. - Champion AI-First Thinking: Push AI adoption across the team's workflows, coaching specialists on AI-assisted approaches and translating AI capabilities into measurable improvements in efficiency and quality. WHAT YOU'LL NEED - People Leadership Experience: Experience managing or leading a team (formal or informal), with a track record of developing people and improving how a team operates. Strong informal-leadership candidates without a formal title will be considered. - Travel Tech Fluency: Solid working knowledge of travel inventory systems, GDS/NDC content, booking flows, supplier APIs, or similar backend systems. You don't need to be the expert in every vertical, but enough fluency to be a credible technical partner across flights, ground transportation, and stays. - Operational Depth: 4+ years in operations, travel technology, or supplier management, with experience owning workflows end to end, not just executing steps someone else designed. - Strategic Thinking: You connect operational work to business outcomes and make trade-offs confidently, balancing hands-on execution with team-level priorities. - Process Design Expertise: Proven ability to design frameworks and standards that scale, not just solving problems, but building systems and coaching a team to prevent them. - Communication Excellence: You tailor your message for technical and non-technical audiences, and you're comfortable representing your team's work to senior stakeholders. How We Work At Perk, we take an IRL-first approach to work, where our team works together in-person 3 days a week. As such, this role requires you to be based within commuting distance of our hubs. We fundamentally believe in the value of meeting in real life to improve connectivity, productivity, creativity and ultimately making us a great place to work. For certain roles, we can help with relocation from anywhere in the world, English is the official language at the office. Please submit your resume in English if you choose to apply. Do not forget to submit an updated portfolio and/or resume. Perk is a global company with a diverse customer base, and we want to make sure the people behind our product reflect that. We’re an equal opportunity employer, which means you’re welcome at Perk regardless of how you look, where you’re from, or anything else that makes you, well, you. Protect Yourself from Recruitment Scams All official communication from Perk will always come from email addresses ending in @perk.com http://perk.com or @externalperk.com http://externalperk.com, our verified social media channels, or recruiters listed on our official LinkedIn page. We will never ask you to pay for equipment, training, or fees, request sensitive personal information such as bank details early in the process, or communicate through unofficial apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. If you receive a message claiming to be from Perk that seems suspicious, please do not respond. Forward it to security [at] perk .com, and we will confirm whether it is legitimate. #LI-Hybrid